The ground beneath me lifted. The entire crater rose and began to slowly tilt to the side as the massive, thirty-kilometre pyramid that had been rooted in the earth for ten thousand years began to rise.
The fox woke. Its blue eyes snapped open and found the world going mad, and its tail wrapped so tightly around my neck that it hurt a bit. I barely acknowledged it before I began moving.
Nowhere specific, I mean there was nowhere freaking specific to move to, since the entire earth was coming apart, I began weaving through the shattering earth, skipping over gaps and running above the nearest building-sized slabs, while watching with one eye as the massive pyramid kept rising out of the earth while it was releasing a loud droning sound.
I had seen the pyramid fall in the vision of the past, and now I was seeing it rise, and unlike the vision that happened in the past that gave me a layer of distance, which framed the horror and the immensity of the pyramid as something manageable... There was nothing like seeing this with the naked eye that shook everything I knew of reality.
And as if that was not enough, the base of the pyramid was revealed, and I saw what was causing it to rise... it was a hand.
∞
I had seen the tentacles of the Pale Matron, watched them slowly solidify from mirage to mass, and understood, intellectually, the scale of the Pale Matron.
The scale of this being did not make much sense to me, but I thought I had understood a part of it, but I was wrong... I knew nothing. A part of me had thought the Pale Matron may have the shape of an octopus, or a mutated combination of tentacles.
The hand that lifted the pyramid from the earth was not a tentacle; it was a hand, five-fingered, each finger the length of a dozen city blocks, the palm alone as wide as the entire valley had been, and it was white, the same white as the tentacles but somehow, more intended, as if this hand was never meant to see the light of the sun.
It came up through the earth, trailing soil, bedrock, and ancient strata that had not seen light in an age, as it lifted the entire pyramid into the heavens.
∞
I was fighting to stay alive as the draft of wind that erupted from the rising pyramid was so great it could flatten a city. The pyramid kept rising, a thousand meters, three thousand... rising toward a sky that was coming apart at the clouds.
The demons that had been circling the pyramid went mad. They dove towards the ascending pyramid, and I could not tell if they were trying to stop it or reach it or simply couldn’t help themselves, but there was nothing but chaos, and I knew that they were dying, probably in batches of hundreds of thousands.
But I also knew that to them, their deaths were meaningless, as long as the Pale Matron existed, they would never truly perish. My mind returned to the first time I saw a Narghul Sorcerer, and after tasting his corruption, I had ripped out my own heart and presented it to the demon as an offering.
Perhaps this was the same thing I was seeing here, but on a scale that defied meaning... the Pale Matron was rising, and so the demons would welcome her by bathing the pyramid that had kept her imprisoned with their blood.
I watched for one second longer than I should have, an equal amount of amazement and horror filling my soul, as a second gap opened under my feet.
∞
The earth dropped under me, a hundred-metre section of basin floor simply collapsing, and I fell with it. Lightning Incarnate was the only thing that saved me, the world going white as I shed the body for a half-second and rematerialized on a slab that was also falling, faster than the last one.
The fox was still at my neck, even when I became lightning, and I don’t know how. It had wrapped its tails, more than one now, I couldn’t count, they were light and fast, around my throat and shoulder, and held on tight.
I ran across the falling slabs, leaping the gaps, Lightning Incarnate spent in half-second bursts, blink, land, blink, land, each slab a little lower than the last, the world decomposing under me in real time.
Then I realized that the collapse of the ground beneath me was happening because a second hand was rising from the distant south... how fucking big is this thing?
It seemed to be grabbing the earth, perhaps finding a purchase to grip and push against, but that normal gesture was destroying everything that was left.
A demon the size of a small mountain came down out of the red sky with leathery wings spread wide enough to cast a shadow over the whole tilting basin, and it looked at me, before looking away as if I was too small to eat.
Then its gaze fell on the white fox on my shoulder, and a gray flame rose in its eyes, and I could almost taste the greed on its massive batlike face. It dove down towards me, and in its distraction, it was struck by the Matron’s rising hand, and its massive body was crushed to pieces.
I don’t know how strong this demon was, but it was far stronger than Vrakth, and yet, a small brush from the hand crushed it to a fine paste.
Fuck... I was not going to make it; the world was taking itself apart faster than I could navigate the pieces, and this creature emerging from the earth made everything I had gained during the loop useless. How do you even begin fighting something like this?
The second hand rose fully from the earth to the south and swung, and I could not see the full devastation caused by just that simple movement. I saw the hand come down and cover the entire sky above me.
The fox pressed its face against my jaw, hard, and I put one hand up over it... there was nothing else to do, and the white palm hit the earth, and mercifully, I was crushed to nothing before it even touched me.